Understanding memory for faces in Parkinson's disease: the role of con®gural processing Rosanna Cousins a, *, J. Richard Hanley a , Ann D.M. Davies a , Christopher J. Turnbull b , Jeremy R. Playfer c a Department of Psychology, University of Liverpool, Liverpool, UK b Wirral Hospitals NHS Trust, UK c Royal Liverpool University Hospitals, Liverpool, UK Received 10 August 1998; received in revised form 8 June 1999; accepted 24 September 1999 Abstract It has previously been reported that unfamiliar face recognition memory is impaired in Parkinson's disease (PD) [(Dewick, H. C., Hanley, J. R., Davies, A. D. M., Playfer, J. R. & Turnbull, C. J., Perception and memory for faces in Parkinson's disease. Neuropsychologia, 1991, 29, 785±802), (Haeske-Dewick, H. C., Are perception and memory for faces in¯uenced by a speci®c age at onset factor in Parkinson's disease? Neuropsychologia, 1996, 34, 315±320), (Levin, B. E., Llabre, M. M. & Weiner, W. J., Cognitive impairments associated with early Parkinson's disease. Neurology, 1989, 39, 557±561)]. In the work reported here, we consider the possible mechanisms that might underlie this impairment. 28 PD patients and 28 controls were given a two-part test of recognition memory for words and faces, and two perceptual tests to measure their con®gural and componential processing ability. We found that PD patients were signi®cantly worse than controls on the recognition memory test for faces, but not when the stimuli were words. In addition, PD patients were signi®cantly impaired relative to controls on the closure test (FCT) used to measure con®gural processing, but there was no dierence between the two groups on a test of componential processing ability. Multiple regression analyses revealed that even after accounting for the in¯uence of age, intelligence and level of depression, con®gural processing ability was the important predictor of unfamiliar face recognition memory in Parkinson's disease. There was no eect of Parkinson's disease speci®c variables on either face recognition or FCT performance. In addition, some recently diagnosed patients were poor at face recognition. It is suggested that face con®guration skills may be aected very early in the course of Parkinson's disease, and that this may be connected to the fact that considerable nigrostriatal degeneration and alteration in brain neurotransmitter levels occur before the clinical symptoms of PD appear. # 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Face recognition; Closure; Modularity; Holistic processing; Componential processing 1. Introduction Although Parkinson's disease (PD) is by de®nition a movement disorder, it is now widely accepted that people with PD also manifest neuropsychological de®- cits across a range of functions including visual percep- tion [24]. The diversity of cognitive disorders found in PD may arise from a fundamental impairment in executive processing in the frontal lobes [9,19,57]. A frontal lobe `working memory' component would be at risk in PD through the anatomical and functional feed- back loops between the (compromised) basal ganglia and the prefrontal cortex [1,62,73]. If this is the case, then non-demented PD patients will show impaired memory performance when the tasks are dependent on the integrity of the frontal lobes [61,62,73]. In line with this argument, there is evidence that the storing and consolidating processes that are under the Neuropsychologia 38 (2000) 837±847 0028-3932/00/$ - see front matter # 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. PII: S0028-3932(99)00133-5 www.elsevier.com/locate/neuropsychologia * Corresponding author: Centre for Studies in the Social Sciences, Edge Hill, St Helens Road, Ormskirk, Lancashire L39 4QP, UK. Fax: +44-1695-584675. E-mail address: cousinsr@edgehill.ac.uk (R. Cousins).